Twelve Subjects of Children

Twelve Subjects of Children is the English designation under which a small Kawase Hasui figural cycle circulates in Western cataloguing, a project distinguished from the artist's overwhelming output of landscape and place portrait by its address to the subject of childhood and to the figural genre that Hasui only rarely treated. Hasui, who had trained under the Nihonga master Kaburaki Kiyokata before being introduced to the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo around 1918 and whose mature shin-hanga career was built almost entirely on the meisho-e landscape and the modern place portrait, undertook the children's cycle as one of the few sustained departures from the genre that defined his reputation, and the set accordingly belongs to a small body of figural and bijin-influenced work that punctuates his enormous landscape oeuvre. The treatment of children as a discrete subject of bijin-ga had antecedents in late-Edo and Meiji print culture, with kacho and figural artists of the nineteenth century including children in their figure compositions, and the twentieth-century shin-hanga movement returned to the subject through the figural specialists in the Watanabe orbit, including Ito Shinsui, Yamakawa Shuho, and Hasui in this small cycle. The collaborative shin-hanga production method, in which Watanabe's separately trained block carvers and printers carried through the artist's drawing under the publisher's coordinating direction, allowed the children's prints to achieve the soft modeling, subtle skin gradations, and detailed kimono patterns that the genre required, with Hasui bringing to the project the linear refinement of his Kiyokata-school training. Within Hasui's career the cycle stands as a relatively marginal production within an oeuvre dominated by the great Watanabe landscape projects, and modern scholarship treats it as evidence of the figural range that Hasui occasionally exercised but did not centrally pursue, and of the breadth of subject that Watanabe's program encouraged among its principal artists. Surviving impressions are valued by collectors specifically interested in Hasui's non-landscape work and in the small body of shin-hanga prints addressed to children as their subject, and representative impressions are held in the Watanabe-related collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and other major Western institutions of twentieth-century Japanese print, where they supply context for the genre breadth of the Watanabe shin-hanga program.

The Twelve Subjects of Children series contains 1 prints, created by Kawase Hasui.

The Twelve Subjects of Children series was created by Kawase Hasui (川瀬巴水).

We currently have 3 of 1 known prints from the Twelve Subjects of Children series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.